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The idea of a computer network intended to allow general communication between users of various computers has developed through a large number of stages since the earliest versions of such an idea appeared in the late 1950s. For a variety of reasons, some good, some accidental, the network we know as the Internet formed from a mesh of networks into the global network we know today.
Before the Internet
A Lack of Inter-Networking
Prior to the widespread inter-networking that lead to the Internet, most communication networks were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the stations on the network. Some networks would have gateways or bridges between them, but these bridges were often limited or built specifically for a single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe method, simply allowing its terminals to be connected via long leased lines.
"a network of such , connected to one another by wide-band communication lines" which provided "the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and symbiotic functions. " -- J.C.R Licklider
"For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them.
I said, oh, man, it's obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet." -- Robert W. Taylor, co-writer with Licklider of "The Computer as a Communications Device", in an interview with the New York Times ().
At the core of the inter-networking problem lay the issue of connecting seperate physical networks so they formed one logical network. And during the , several groups worked on, and produced the concept of Packet Switching. Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory, Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation and Leonard Kleinrock at M.I.T. are normally credited with the simultaneous invention of packet switching. Rand's involvement would spark the later myths that the Internet had been created to withstand nuclear attack. While Rand's research projects would evaluate potential to survive combat damage, this was not an intentional design feature of the packet switching networks that followed.
ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used. ARPANET development was centered around the RFC process, still used today for proposing and distributing Internet Protocols and Systems. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker from the University of California, Los Angeles, and published on April 7, 1969.
Following on from DARPA's research, packet switching networks were developed by the International Telecommunication Union in the form of X.25 networks. X.25 formed the basis for the network between British academic and research sites, SERCnet, in 1974, which would later be reorganized as JANET.
Unlike ARPAnet, X.25 was also commonly available for buisness use. This resulted in individual comercial uses, such as banks using x.25 services for branch office data systems. X.25 would be used for the first dial-in public access networks; such as Compuserve and Tymnet. In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities and technical support to personal computer users. The company broke new ground again in 1980 as the first online service to offer real-time chat with its CB Simulator. Another source of a large body of users, and some applications, were the America Online (AOL) and Prodigy dial in networks, and many comercial BBS such as The WELL.
In 1979 students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using simple Bourne shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line with nearby University of North Carolina. Following public release of the software, the mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded. UUCPnet, as it would later be named, would also create gateways and links between Fidonet and dial-up BBS hosts.
UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, and ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections. By 1983 the number of UUCP hosts had grown to 550, nearly doubling to 940 in the 1984.
FidoNet was originally founded in 1984 by Tom Jennings of San Francisco, California as a means to network together BBSes that used his own "Fido" BBS software. Over time, other BBS software was independently adapted to support the relevant FidoNet protocols, and the network became a popular means for hobbyist computer users to communicate. FidoNet was non-commercial, and mostly popular amongst hobbyist computer users, many of them hackers and radio amateurs.
With so many diferent network methods, something needed to unify them. Robert E. Kahn of ARPA and ARPANET recruited Vint Cerf of Stanford University to work with him on the problem. By 1973, they had soon worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol, and instead of the network being responsible for reliability, as in the ARPANET, the hosts became responsible. Cerf credits Hubert Zimmerman and Louis Pouzin (designer of the CYCLADES network) with important work on this design.
With the role of the network reduced to the bare minimum, it became possible to join almost any networks together, no matter what their characteristics were, thereby solving Kahn's initial problem. DARPA agreed to fund development of prototype software, and after several years of work, the first somewhat crude demonstration of what had by then become TCP/IP occurred in July 1977. This new method quickly spread across the networks, and in 1983, TCP/IP protocols replaced the earlier NCP protocol as the principal protocol of the ARPANET.
After the ARPANET had been up and running for several years, ARPA looked for another agency to hand off the network to; ARPA's primary business was funding cutting-edge research and development, not running a communications utility. Eventually, in July1975, the network had been turned over to the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense. In 1984, the U.S. military portion of the ARPANet was broken off as a separate network, the MILNET.
The networks based around the ARPANET were government funded and therefore restricted to noncommercial uses such as research; unrelated commercial use was strictly forbidden. This initially restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were.
Another branch of the U.S. government, the National Science Foundation, became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a succsessor to ARPANET. In 1984 this resulted in the first Wide Area Network designed specificaly to use TCP/IP. This grew into the NSFNetbackbone, intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF, was established in 1986.
It was around this time when ARPANET began to merge with NSFNet, that the term Internet originated. With, "an internet" meaning any network using TCP/IP. "The Internet" came to mean a global and large network using TCP/IP, which at the time meant NSFNet and ARPANET.
CERN and the European Internet
In 1984 the move in Europe towards TCP/IP started, and CERNET was converted over to using it. The TCP/IPCERNET remained isolated from the Internet, forming a small internal internet.
In 1988Daniel Karrenberg, from the Amsterdam Mathematics Centre, visited Ben Segal, CERN's TCP/IP Coordinator; looking for advice about the transition of the European side of the UUCP Usenet network (much of which ran over X.25 links) over to TCP/IP. In 1987, Ben Segal had met with Len Bosack from the then still small company Cisco about TCP/IP routers, and was able to give Karrenberg advice and forward him on to Cisco for the appropriate hardware. This expanded the European portion of the Internet across the existing UUCP networks, and in 1989 CERN opened its first external TCP/IP connections.
Opening the network to Commerce
The interest in commercial use of the Internet became a hotly debated topic. Although commercial use was forbidden, the exact definition of commercial use could be unclear and subjective. Everyone agreed that one company sending an invoice to another company was clearly commercial use, but anything less was up for debate. UUCPNet had no such restrictions, which would eventually see the official barring of UUCPNet use of ARPANET and NSFNet connections. Some UUCP links still remained connecting to these networks however, as administrators cast a blind eye to their operation.
During the late 1980s the first Internet Service Provider (ISP) companies were formed. Companies like PSINet, UUNET, Netcom, and Portal were formed to provide service to the regional research networks and provide alternate network access, UUCP-based email and Usenet News to the public. The first dial-up ISP, world.std.com, opened in 1989.
This caused controversy amongst university users were outraged at the idea of noneducational use of their networks. Eventually it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education and research.
By 1990, ARPANET had been had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies, and the project came to a close. Following the close of ARPANET, in 1994, the NSFNet, now renamed to ANSNET (Advanced Networks and Services) and allowing Non-Profit Corporations access, lost its standing as the backbone of the Internet. Both government instiutions and competing commercial providers created their own backbones and interconnections. Regional NAPs (network access points) became the primary interconnections between the many networks. The NSFNet was dropped as the main backbone, and the final commercial restrictions were gone.
The Internet has developed a significant subculture dedicated to the idea that the Internet is not owned or controlled by any one person, company, group, or organization. Nevertheless, some standardization and control is necessary for anything to function.
The liberal RFC publication procedure engendered confusion about the Internet standardization process, and led to more formalization of official accepted standards. The IETF started in January of 1986 as a quarterly meeting of U.S. government funded researchers. Representatives from non-government vendors were invited starting with the fourth IETF meeting in October of that year.
Acceptance of an RFC by the RFC Editor for publication does not automatically make the RFC into a standard. It may be recognized as such by the IETF only after many years of experimentation, use, and acceptance have proven it to be worthy of that designation. Official standards are numbered with a prefix "STD" and a number, similar to the RFC naming style. However, even after becoming a standard, most are still commonly referred to by their RFC number.
In 1992, the Internet Society, a professional membership society was formed, and the IETF was transfered to operation under it as an independant international standards body.
As the early ARPANet grow, hosts were refered to by names, and a HOSTS.TXT file would be distributed from SRI to each host on the network. As the network grew, this became cumbersome. A technical solution came in the form of the Domain Name System, created by Paul Mockapetris, and in 1993 the NSF would create InterNIC to manage the allocations of addresses and management of the address databases.
In 1998 both IANA and InterNIC would be reorganised under the control of ICANN, an a Californianon-profit corporation] contracted by the US Department of Commerce to manage the a number of Internet-related tasks. The role of operating the DNS system was privatised, and opened up to competition, while the central managment of name alocations would be awarded on a contract tender basis.
Use and Culture
The internet has found many new lights creating a few sub-cultures and actually helping many businesses. New bands can send their music to the other side of the country with a click of a mouse. Most of all it has made it possible for self-publication. The youth have become accustom to sites that blog as well as sites where they can make friends over large distances
Despite common belief, e-mail actually predates the Internet; in fact, existing e-mail systems were a crucial tool in creating the Internet. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharingmainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS. In 1969 US Air Force users were sending text messages by making punched cards with long text messages and transmitting them as card decks from one computer to another.
The ARPANETcomputer network made a large contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one report which indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after its creation, in 1969. Ray Tomlinson initiated the use of the @ sign to separate the names of the user and their machine in 1971.
A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be passed this way between a number of networks, including the ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNET, as well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP.
In adition, UUCPnet carried a broadcast medium for publishing text files that could be read by many others. The News software developed by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott in 1979 would be used to distribute news and builitin board like messages. This would quickly grow into discussion groups on a wide range of topics. On ARPAnet and NSFNET similar discussion groups would form via mailing lists, discussing both technical issues, and the more frivilious items such as science fiction.
The growth of personal e-mail and discussion groups would be called the Killer application of the Internet.
As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the growing need to be able to find and organize files and related information. Projects such as Gopher, WAIS, and the Anonymous FTP Archive Site list attempted to create schemes to organize distributed data and present it to people in an easy-to-use form. Unfortunately, these projects fell short in being able to accommodate all the various existing file and data types, and in being able to grow without centralized bottlenecks. Gopher's development would later be halted when the University of Minnesota asserted its intellectual property rights over the technology.
Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 was the first to develop a network based implementation of the concept, out of sheer exasperation after he kept raising his idea at conferences and no one in the Internet or hypertext communities would implement it for him. Working at CERN, he wanted a way for physicists to share information about their research. This documentation project became the source of the inventions that made the World Wide Web possible. By releasing his implementation to public use, he ensured the technology would become widespread.
The World Wide Web has lead to a wide spread culture of individual self publishing and co-operative publishing. The moment to moment recounts of a Blog, and the resource and information store of Misplaced Pages are both a result of the open ease of creating a public website.
As the Web grew, search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the web and allow people to find things. The first search engine, Lycos, was created in 1993 as a university project. At the end of 1993, Lycos indexed a total of 800,000 web pages. By August 2001, the Google search engine tracked over 1.3 billion web pages and the growth continues. In early 2004, Google's index exceeded 4 billion pages. On November 11, 2004, this number had doubled to just over 8 billion. On August 82005, Yahoo! announced that its online search engine index spans more than 20 billion Web documents and images.
